2 Click the small icon at the bottom-right of the Styles group. Word displays the. The Modify Style dialog box for the Comment Text style. So, we can only conclude that this style is one not currently used in Word. Apr 01, 2019  Microsoft Office changed the font size and style to Calibri 11 pt in Office 2007. For a lot of users, the size is too small, and some of you might want to change the font style as well.

Q. I just upgraded to Word 2002 (in Office XP) and, with just a few exceptions, I find it quite an improvement. But one of those exceptions is literally giving me a headache. If I insert a comment in a document, Word encircles the comment with a balloon off to the right of the text and runs a red dotted line to the point in the text where I added the comment. So far so good. But the default comment’s font is so small I have to strain to read it and I can’t seem to change it.

A lot of people find this blog when they’re trying to sort out specific problems with their comment boxes (, or, ). Here are general instructions on customising your comment boxes (or balloons, as they are officially called) in Word. Why would I want to customise my comment balloons?To be honest, the main reason for doing this is if something goes wrong. Hello Brad and thanks for your comment. Unfortunately, all of the options in track changes and comment balloons are peculiar to the computer upon which the document is being viewed. There is no way that I or any of my editor pals have found to make a default apply particular settings to a document so that it will stay the same when viewed on another computer.

You can try this yourself by changing the settings then opening it on a laptop or other computer – it defaults to that particular computer’s settings. I tend to send a link to my posts on customising comment boxes along with the document if I know someone has had trouble before!Like. I was working on a document in which the text was running right to left in the comment boxes. In the process of trying to figure out how to change that–before I found your site–I changed something that is now causing the reviewing pane to open twice, once in the left column and then again across my document, so now my whole document is covered. The second pane also seems to set at the bottom of the document, but when I scroll a little, it disappears. Has anyone got a solution to change this back to the default setting? Thanks for your comment.

Unfortunately, you can’t combine comments from different reviewers under one name. Even if they all adjusted their names on their individual computers to read “Team A”, Word would ‘helpfully’ put them in different colours for you.

You can combine tracked changes, however, using this slightly clunky workaround:Accept all changesSave documentOpen changed document and original document using the “Compare” featureProduce a new document with all tracked changes showing. This will display the name / initials of the person whose computer it’s done on, but if you change your name and initials to Team A first, these will show on the changesI hope this helps!Like. Lotus suspension analysis 5 03 crackles.

Liz, I was directed to this post by Katharine O’Moore-Klopf in hopes that it would fix my issue. Unfortunately, it hasn’t.In most documents, my MS Word comment bubble text shows up single-spaced (I believe this is the default and certainly my preference). However, I’ve recently begun work for a new client and whenever I insert a comment in one of their documents it shows up as double-spaced.

Does anyone know how to change the line spacing for comment text? I’ve done a Google search and all I can find are references to the “Comment Text” style—unfortunately, that style says single-spaced so it must not be the problem.I have MS Word 365 (which is basically Word 2013), but I have a feeling this issue would occur with earlier versions too.Do you have any suggestions?

Any help would be appreciated.LouannLike. Thanks for your question, Louann. Adolph coors family. Have you tried Balloon Text and looking at the spacing there? In all styles, you can access the line spacing by clicking on Modify, then Format, then Paragraph, in which case you find the line spacing and Space Before and Space After options (for some bizarre reason, you can change the Before and After spacing using the buttons with green arrows on them on the first Modify screen, but you have to go into Format – Paragraph to get the line spacing option). I hope that helps – let me know if not!Like.

Ahh, I found the answer to my question (see above) at!I added Japanese as an editing language (but didn’t install the corresponding proofing tools which would cost $ and isn’t necessary). Now, I just have to right-click on any comments that show up as double-spaced and uncheck the box next to “snap to grid when document grid is defined.” Once that one comment balloon is showing up single-spaced (the default and my preference), I can highlight it, right-click on the Comment Text style, and choose “update comment text to match selection.” That fixes all of the comment balloons in the document!Like. I assume you want to include the document with comment boxes as an example or either the use of comment boxes or commenting in general. Remember that actually seeing comment boxes depends on who is doing the reading and what is set on their computer. So if you need these to be visible to all readers and printable, the bets thing to do is to bring up the page on your screen, do a screenshot, past that into a Word document and insert that as, if you like, an image of the page rather than the page itself, into your document at the relevant point.

I hope that helps!Like. Hi Jackie, thanks for your question. You can’t stop it highlighting the text in that way, although you can change the colour it uses in Track Changes / Track Changes options (see my Customising Track Changes article for more info ). That will help if it personally annoys you. However, how you set your Track Changes up will not affect what your client / the author sees, as Track Changes is individual to your computer rather than universal. I hope this helps in some way, and glad you’ve found the article useful!Like.

AnnaGood morning. I found your post interesting but have a different type of question. We use an application that creates an auto text from a line of text with strike through and underlining plus a comment box.

This is loaded into a template so that our whole staff has access. The process worked perfectly in 2010, but we now have one machine with 2013. That machine deletes the comment boxes from the auto text entries if the operator adds an auto text to the template then saves the change. Any ideas?Like.

Hello, and thanks for this article. The difficulty I am trying to surmount is that I have a half dozen generic comment balloons I wish to include at the beginning of each poem I review. The poems of course each have their own particular and peculiar Word formatting. I just wish to insert my generic overall comment set above the title of the poem.

I can’t seem to make the compare or combine functions work for me, using the workaround mentioned here in 2014. “Accept all changes; Save document; Open changed document and original document using the “Compare” feature; Produce a new document with all tracked changes showing.” I may next try to make a template with the comment balloons embedded, but fear that will also contradict the original poem formatting. An additional request. I spend most of my day commenting on students’ Word documents, often on a small laptop. I want to reduce the width of the word 2013 window to the minimum.

Which would mean showing the document only within the page margins. But the Viewzoomtext width command leaves a narrow margin on the left and a full margin on the right, with the Markup Area to the right of that. And a change to the% size seems to reset all the settings.Is there any way to reduce the document view really to Text Width, while leaving the Markup area there? Screen space is too valuable to leave blank margins.Then is it possble to expand/contract the% view setting of the word window without altering the contents of the window? This will allow me to change the apparent font size without the window being reformatted.Thank you againLike. Thank you for your question.

I usually play with the size of the window my Word document is in until the left margin is against the left edge of the window and the right shows my comments, etc. But changing the size using the percentage slider at the bottom of the window doesn’t change the layout or settings of my window, which makes me wonder if you’re in the correct view – are you using Print Layout to view your document? I hope that helps, someone might well come along with other suggestions, too.

You can also change the size of your comment balloons which will affect the width of your markup area.Like. Hi Liz, I’m a little late to this party but I wonder if you can help. I’m reviewing a document and adding text responses within existing comment balloons from other users; I’d like to differentiate my text from their using boldface, but the boldface attribute is quite often lost from one save to the next and I have to laboriously re-bold my responses. Is there a setting I can use to preserve comment text that is not all one attribute, or do I have to create a separate balloon for each response? Thanks in advance!Like. Thank you Liz.I found that here is one (rather complicated) way to do it:First, you set the color for the comment boxes to “black” in the Word Comment Options.

The lines and borders of the comment boxes/bubbles then become black, but the fill is still grey.Then you go to the advanced Word Layout options:- Compatibility Options at the very bottom and set “print colors as black on noncolor printers”Then, interestingly, the grey fill is not printed black but white. However, this only works on printers that actually report themselves as noncolor, which some color printers don’t, even if you set them to greyscale.Like.

I am working on Nepali text which is written in Devanagari script. I do not want to change the signals like ‘Highlighted’, ‘Formatted’, Comment and comment no. I only want to arrange a setting where I only want to write in Nepali fonts in the comments. I did try following the instructions on this page but ended up having everything changed and I had to revert it back to what it was like in the beginning. I would be very thankful if anyone understood my concern and tried to help. Thanks!NB: The keyboard layout for Nepali fonts is completely different to the English characters.Like. You seem to have solved everyone else’s problems so I am hoping you can solve mine, as well.

I have Word 2013 and from the time I first started using it when I click on the Review tab and insert a new comment it would appear showing my name and my Microsoft “account picture” plus the typed comment. Now the account picture has disappeared and all you see is that icon of a generic person. Because I’m a medical editor who is constantly working on files with comments from many different people the photo is actually useful because at a glance I can whiz through a 40-page document, just slowing down when I see the photo in order to see if people have responded to my comments. I have no idea why it disappeared. It may or may not be related to a time when one of the docs for whom I was doing editing asked me to substitute his name for the comments so it would appear all the comments were from him. I later changed it back to my name and initials.

I can’t honestly say if that’s when the photo disappeared but it was probably at least close to that. So.whether or not it’s related to that, any thoughts on restoring the photo?Like. If you click on the Review tab and then the arrow to the right of Tracking it brings up “Track Change Options” and one of those is “Pictures by Comments”. I can turn that on or off but that just either shows the little generic icon or removes it. The picture that has always been there previously, the one associated with my computer and Microsoft account, does not reappear in place of the icon. I have googled this for hours and your answers here seemed to be the only thing I could find with related information.

I think you have a different version of Word because not all the options you show in your comment actually appear under File with my version. I did find the Trust Center and Privacy Options going through a different path but there’s nothing there related to this.

And if I click on File, Options, General, then under Personalize your copy of Microsoft Office it shows my user name as the same as my Google user name and shows my initials correctly but there’s nothing there related to a photo by comments. So thanks for trying!Like. Liz—Yay, that works!! But in case anyone else has this problem here’s what you need to know. I had previously read this suggestion during my endless googling to solve the problem and had tried it to no avail. But since you also suggested it, I thought about it and realized that I had unchecked that and then closed the document and Word, and then restarted Word and reopened the document, and nothing had changed. But I hadn’t closed Windows.

So this time I unchecked “Always use these values regardless of sign in to Office” and then closed the document, closed Word, and shut down the computer. When I restarted and opened the document, the problem was solved.

Thank you, thank you, thank you. And thanks for being one of those people who selflessly continues to provide solutions to problems created by Microsoft since their site never gives a coherent or useful answer to anything. You’re appreciated!! Liz, thanks for your response.

I can of course send you a screenshot, thanks for being so accommodating! –, but don’t know if there is a need to, since you have touched upon my problem in your last comment. You say that there appears “a grey box with the full text of the comment when I hover over the text I’m commenting on”.

And it is exactly this grey box I want to go away! Even if it doesn’t fully cover the comment, it covers some of it (perhaps more on my PC than others, since I use large font size). So if you could provide me with the recipe so this grey box you mentioned doesn’t appear my problem is solved!ThanksTerryLiked. I’m working on a resume that has narrow margins to maximize the amount of content that can fit on a page, and my client’s comments are covering the text at the far right. I can’t figure out how to adjust the comments so that they don’t cover the last quarter-inch of text.Do you know how to move the comment boxes further to the right so that they don’t cover the text?

I’ve tried putting them on the left, but then they cover the text on the far left. I’ve also tried adjusting the comment width, but that doesn’t help. The comments still cover the text; they just don’t display as far beyond the edge of the margins.I’ve had this problem before, but it seems to be occurring more often lately.

It’s driving me crazy because I can’t see the words and punctuation at the far right of the document, which is making editing a nightmare. Hi Liz,Thank you for this article! I just discovered your blog as I was trying to figure out how to change the font and point size of the text in my comment balloons. When I edit documents for authors, I always change the text of the main document to Calibri 12. I would also like the text in my comment balloons to be Calibri 12 so that if I copy and paste something from the main text into my comment balloon, the font and point size will be the same. More importantly, I often suggest in my comments alternate wording the author might want to use rather than arbitrarily make the changes myself. If the author does want to use the suggested wording, it’d be great for him/her to be able to copy and paste my suggestion into the main document and then have the fonts/point sizes all be the same.

Is this possible? I’ve tried doing what you suggest, but I must be doing something wrong because the point size is still coming out smaller when I copy and paste something I wrote in a comment balloon into the main text. I recently updated to Word 2016 and this is a problem that seems to have carried over from Word 2013 (but is now even MORE annoying)I can’t seem to view comments made on deleted text. They are almost invisible and show as a very thin line in the text, with nothing displayed in the right margin (except for the deletion itself). The only way I can find to view the comment text is to switch to “Balloons in All Markup view show: Comments and formatting” under the Track Changes Options menu but this automatically toggles the revisions to show inline (which I find impossible to work with in a heavily tracked document).Is there a way to make ALL comments visible in the right-hand margin (even those on deleted text) and keep all the revisions in balloons also?Like.